A question for those who run small newsrooms with Ghost or those who consult with them like @Cathy_Sarisky
Any recommendations for a simple task tracking app or service to track story states as they flow through the system, tech tasks and other TODOs?
Like Kanban board, Trello… something simple to help small teams get organized without getting in the way or breaking the bank.
Planka is a good lightweight project that can be self-hosted and have a plenty of cool features.
I’m all ears listening!
I’ve got an older article about how to handle workflows, but I really wish Ghost had something better built-in. Or maybe someone needs to build a little “sidecar” for Ghost that provides workflow management…
I have been on a tool-building kick lately. Feel free to check out my “Editorial” tool at https://tools.spectralwebservices.com
I’m definitely interested in feedback on whether it does what newsrooms need, and what’s missing. :)
Spectral’s Editorial Board looks great for a Ghost-centric workflow. The orgs I’m working with seem to work primarily in Google Docs through most of the flow, only publishing to Ghost at the end. I think that’s because of Google Docs good support for shared editing and comments. Ghost seems to lock editing to a single user at a time and doesn’t support internal comments on posts yet that I’m aware of. Are some other newrooms having success using Ghost from end-to-end for editorial development?
I think the big reason to use Google Docs is specifically for simultaneous editing/“multiplayer”. That to me is /the/ reason. (Better version control/history is nice too, but multiplayer is what everyone seems to want.)
But… the lack of card support (you’ll have to build them after you move the content to Ghost) makes composing in Google Docs if you’re going to publish in Ghost really sort of suboptimal, in my mind. Presumably the text gets workshopped while in the Google Doc, but now it’s not one copy paste, but a bunch of them, to get the text into the cards. And if someone edits the Google Doc again AFTER I’ve built all the cards, and then I’ve got to go find their changes and make them in Ghost.
For comments on drafts: I keep telling people they should try hypothes.is. Make a group, invite your team, and make your comments on the preview link. Notifications and @-ing are possible.
Interestingly, hypothes.is’s source code is open source…
Good tips! Perhaps time to update your post on managing Editorial to include your newest tool:
-laughing- I did! You linked it.